Lest we forget

I thoroughly enjoyed Dean Sharpe's lecture today and could completely understand how one could dedicate their career to the ethics of research.

While at times I'm sure this position can be rife with conflict, I was impressed by the passion he had for developing policy and protecting the rights of participants.

I couldn't help but think of those 'research scandals" he alluded to and in particular found myself thinking of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. I remember studying this case while doing my undergrad and being horrified at how these research projects could have been done. Forget the policy for a moment. How could anyone, let alone academics from reputable institutions be responsible for some of these outrageous and shocking cases? Is it because it is reflective of the innate evil nature of those with power to corrupt those without it? I'm not sure, but whatever the reason, I sit down to my research proposal tonight giving more thought than ever to the ethical considerations and the methods I am choosing.

Out of interest here is a link for a summary of the Stanford Prison Experiment http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Stanford:prison:experiment.html

And just as a reminder so that as researchers we never forget the impact that our research may have on a participant -- The Milgram Experiment on Obedience conducted at Yale University. No matter how important the research question, we cannot let academia and the search for knowledge cloud our judgements and thoughts on first what it means to be human.
http://psychology.about.com/od/historyofpsychology/a/milgram.htm

Now off to that proposal and the daunting task of "framing" my own research proposal.

Research Ethics

This week’s discussion of ethics will be important to my research proposal because I intend to study humans. It was informative to find out what kinds of research proposals require a RER. I had not previously known that RER’s are usually only needed for studies where human subjects have the role of research participant or subject. Other possible roles for humans include collaborators or members of the research team. Human data may also be used for secondary analysis, which is aggregated and anonymous.

Since my study will involve human participants, it is likely that I will need to undergo a Research Ethics Review. I plan to examine the University of Toronto Office of Research Ethics Guidelines and Practices Manual further while putting together my research methodology for Assignment # 4.

Post-Human Research

The ethics around researching "augmented humans" is something of particular interest to me, and will likely inform future research that I do. Human-centred research can be a minefield, and we should be thankful that we have to abide by particular strictures in constructing our research designs. As Heath and company point out, a substantial critique of obtaining informed consent is that research often changes significantly from beginning to end. Remaining tethered to a set of ethical guidelines can ensure that one doesn't stray too far from the path, no matter what new and revelatory findings might arise. (For an engrossing read, I strongly recommend the two-part piece on corruption in the two-part piece on corruption in the Toronto Police Dept. that has been running in Eye for the past two weeks. It focuses on what might be deemed a "research project" - an initial surveillance setup - that quickly spiralled into a massive, multi-year undercover mafia/drug bust that had to be abandoned when fears of early findings coming to light were brought up to the top brass.)

A different set of ethical concerns arise when studying the physical interconnection between humans and technology, whether one studies prosthesis or technology that breaks the skin. For those of you interested in the subject, I would strongly recommend that you jump over to the iTable section of the iSchool website and find the paper presented earlier this term by Dirk Rodenburg, a PhD student in the program. (The annotated copy, with notes from Brian Cantwell Smith, is particularly valuable.) Dirk writes about the ethics of the "enhanced human" athlete and, although his paper isn't necessarily a site for exploring the act of researching augmented humans, it offers great insight into how such a biological classification determines new ways of communicating with and about subjects. Katherine Hayles, in her book How We Became Posthuman, expands considerably on this subject. Do the same ethical guidelines we use with humans apply to cyborgs? At what point does an "augmented human" become a cyborg? How do we respect the human dignity of an augmented human, especially when there might be greater temptation to treat cyborgs as a means to an end in research?

What's interesting to me, is that a great deal of this knowledge is being hammered out by feminist technoscientists, building on the work of earlier post-structuralists (rather than traditional ethicists). Is the emergence of research on augmented or enhance humans a suitable locale for building in, at the kernel level, things like race/sex/gender issues, access, privacy, and agency? And what of informed consent? If new research in this area is increasingly being done on subjects with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, how does this impact the necessity of capturing informed consent? Consider, for example, the somewhat recent case of Stephen Hawking's wife. He, of course, has been the most prominent "test subject" of research on the augmented body. How does the introduction of a "controlling and manipulative" person in his life impact the decisions that are made around his body as a blank canvas?

Salsa dancing lit. review

After developing a bibliogrphy list of 20 books and articles that are not directly related to my research question, and an one-hour consultation appointment with the head librarian of the reference department at the 4th floor of Robarts library, I have finally accepted the fact that I am really doing a salsa-dancing social science research here. If the experienced reference librarian also hasn't got anything talking directly on my research question, what else can I rely on? Luker for sure, and maybe my skip reading skills that I have developed over the years.

2 months ago when I began to take the Research Method course, I have posted a sticky note on my fridge: "If you sit with your interest long enough, with enough kindness and patience, a research question will in fact emerge. Trust yourself and your work, and all will be well, eventually" (Luker, 2008, p.232). Now I have finally found my research question, and what next? Well, this time I write down this:"Once you have decided that yours is a case of Element A and Element B and Element C, you can answer the question, "What is this a case of?" and you can then go out and read books and articles by smart people that have nothing to do with your case per se, but are very illuminating about Elements A, B, and C in other situations, and better yet, about the interrelationship. Remember, the one thing that all social scientists are doing is looking for pattern recognition" (Luker, 2008, p.134).

After spending the entire Friday afternoon in the Urban Affairs library reading articles, I finally realized what Luker said that "if you specify the theoretically relevant elements and then go educate yourself about what otehr smart people have said about the arrangement of those elements in other contexts, you may well find yourself being surprised. If you can set aside your initial emotion of outrage or concern and specify the elements, bumping them up to a new level of generality, you may well change from whatever was our first, pre-research position"(Luker, 2008, p.138). My research question is why aren't the next generation of Chinese Torontonians using the Chinese Cultural Centre. My original perspective is that these second and greater generations of Chinese Canadians are lack of language skills to appreciate the Chinese historical heritage and civilization, but one academic paper dated back to the 1980s criticized the Canadian high school education system and that many high school teachers were not only lack of knowledge on Chinese culture or hsitorical heritage, but also held discrimination on Asian ethnic groups. My research subjects are Chinese Canadian next generations who are merely college or university students, who probably grow up with the said racist high school teachers. This has given me an insight to review the Canadian high school education system in Ontario as well. Luker's salsa-dancing theory is getting more and more practical now.

Narrative Research Processes

This week’s reading on narrative research is relevant to my research proposal because I want to investigate the subjective experiences of a vulnerable group -- that is, people with social anxiety. It is important that stories about life experiences be viewed as legitimate because they offer a type of natural contextualization that is not always present with other methods.

I am most interested in the problem-solution approach. According to Ollerenshaw & Creswell (2002), the process involves audio-taping interviews, transcribing them, and then reading and re-reading the transcripts to get a sense of the data. I like this kind of approach because it encourages the researcher to discover patterns in the data through repetition. This way, researchers do not begin by looking for specific elements, but allow meaning to naturally emerge.

The next step is to color-code transcripts for the elements of plot structure, to organize the color-coded transcripts into events, and to sequence the events until they make sense. The researcher rearranges the sequence until a resolution to the problem emerges. This approach to problem solving seems useful for complex puzzles and can help researchers discover creative solutions that might not be found using a linear process. I like the idea of rearrangements because it implies that several solutions could be possible, and this method gives the researcher a chance to consider and test each one until the most appropriate is found.

Netnography

Catchy. This is the term Robert Kozinets uses to refer to online ethnography. I admit it's a compelling read (as compelling as an instructional manual on bypassing the methodological challenges presented by virtual ethnography can possibly be). I realized it was not enough to conduct interviews with Internet cafe users or email/hand out surveys; to fully understand the impact of new media in the Arab world, it is essential to follow people's social activities, interactions, and usage of media technologies online. Is it really meaningful to present a study of the democratizing influence of the Internet without studying the content of political blogs, comments, online forums, even social networking sites? In another article, I read the story of a Facebook user named Esraa Abdel Fattah, who started a group in sympathy with a textile workers' strike that led to nation-wide protests against low wages and neoliberal privatization in Egypt. Guess Facebook can be used for non-trivial purposes!

Now the problem is choosing an online group. So many different avenues to choose from: Facebook, Twitter, blogs by prominent Egyptian journalists such as Wael Abbas, even blogs by Muslim Brotherhood members. I was surprised to learn what an active presence they have online.

This'll be fun, can't wait to write 6,500 words on this!

From Luker's "data reduction and analysis" to my research survey questiond design

In addition to our discussion on the difference between Luker and Knight in yesterday's class, I was in fact doubting whether it was relevant to my final research proposal at the very beginning. After all, I will not be actually writing the real paper even when I am articulating that 6,500 words of research proposal. Why bothered to think about it at this point? As I mentioned in the class this week, Luker's readings always provide me inspiration. It doesn't disappoint me this time either. As I read through the entire chapter and reach to the exercise section, I finally realize Luker's codebooks content outline: "code name", "brief description", "when to use", "when not to use", and "example" (pp.215-216). Just like a fresh light crashing on the dark night sky, I suddenly realize that the "data reduction and analysis" can be essential guidelines for my own research survey design. While designing my research survey questions, I definitely need to think about what kind of information that can be rich enough for reducation and valuable enough for analysis. Whatever answers that I am hoping to generate from those questions have to be diverse enough for categorizing and meanwhile directly related to my research question. I am not sure if this is the so-call "reverse thinking", but it seems that I am up to something that I am still lack of a clear picture.

I am also reconsidering the content volume of my survey. My original plan was to design a survey with 20 questions that will contain 15 multiple choices and 5 open-ended questions. However, by the fact that it takes me up to 30minutes to answer 20 multiple choices, I begin to wonder if 5 open-ended questions will be too much or not. The survey questions are designed to be distributed online through Facebook. How long will my participants be willing to hang around on Facebook to answer my survey questions? Can they stay for 30 minutes, or even an hour? According to Luker, these days online survey only has 30-40% responses (pp.147). A friend of mine has over 200 "friends" under her Facebook account and she has distributed a survey containing only 10 multiple choices that takes me no more than 5 minutes to complete on Facebook. The result was that she only got 20 friends who responded to her survey questions. Maybe I should only recruit "volunteers" for my focus group interview but merely rely on financial initiatives to secure survey takers.

Inter-Coder Reliability and Mechanical Turk

After the discussion yesterday regarding inter-coder reliability I had an interesting idea. There is a service that Amazon offers called "Mechanical Turk". This service allows businesses and developers to programmatically create what they call human intelligence tasks (HITs). An HIT usually consists of a simple task, such as identifying the object in an image to more complex tasks, such as language translation.

In the case of inter-coder reliability, a researcher could develop an HIT that requires a user to complete short coding examples, and then compare those results across (potentially) thousands of users. The only downside is that people expect to be paid for completing an HIT - but so do coders. Even more interesting is the fact that one could use Mechanical Turk to do other types of experiments as well. You can also choose your sample relatively granularly. In any case examples like this show some pretty interesting potential.

Complexity

I found Luker's discussion of data reduction and analysis (ch. 10) compelling. The motto for this chapter seems to be something like: 'reduction without reductivism'. Luker has mentioned the view that pattern recognition plays a fundamental role in social research in previous chapters and initially I was wary: the phrase 'pattern recognition' is often used to describe simplistic causal relations. While it's true that there are relatively simple social phenomena that can be explained in terms of simple causal relationships, I'm really only interested in the more complex, messier side of social research. I've become interested in actor-network-theory (ANT) -- particularly as it is described by John Law in the article "After ANT" -- which is fundamentally concerned with complexity. As I understand it ANT is an attempt to describe complex phenomena in their complexity instead of reducing the phenomena to simplistic representations. Law borrows Deleuze and Guattari's image of a rhizome to describe ANT's method: to borrow Luker's description of Ragin's method, a rhizomatic structure is "neither linear nor random" (pp.208). Like actor-network-theory then, Luker (channeling Ragin) wants to preserve complexity and wants to understand social phenomena rhizomatically and non-reductively. Qualitative comparative analysis is a means to that end.

I've written the above to demonstrate that I am both genuinely interested in what qualitative comparative analysis has to offer and that I understand why it's important (by way of ANT). I also have a good understanding of sufficient and necessary causes (I've read my Aristotle), of induction and its related problems (Hume), and, yes, I've actually spent time writing out truth tables (for a logic course I took once upon a time). With all of this in mind, and following a few hours of research on Ragin and QCA, I still have no idea how you would actually apply this to actual research. I mean, is it just what Luker presents in the exercise for this chapter? If so, I can't help but feel that the actual method bears no resemblance to her foregoing description of it. I've also spent some time reading about Cronbach's Alpha (mentioned on pp.203) and find it equally confusing: again, I understand the premise but I don't really understand how I'd calculate the alpha value for an actual research project. Also, the mathematical equation on the wikipedia page is terrifying.

Has anyone made any headway with either QCA or Cronbach's alpha? If so, I'm all ears...

Framing my research proposal

Now that I'm in the throes of developing my full research proposal, I've come to the point where I need to flesh out the theoretical framework for my research and provide a context for the niche that my research will cover. I admit I've been having great difficulty with this because I wasn't sure what angle to approach it from given that my research topic could have several aspects as a theoretical framework. In order to think about this further, I went back to Luker thinking that surely there would be something relating to this. And Luker didn't disappoint. On page 62 -65, I found some great examples of how other research has been framed. Luker also talks broadly about how it's possible that a research question will have more than one potential frame and that it's our job to figure out what frame best fits with our ideas, hypothesis and relates most directly to what it is we want to find out and what argument/discourse we are hoping our research will contribute to. I've found reviewing this section of Luker really helpful and am well on my way to finding the supporting research that I need for my own proposal. Now, maybe I'll do a little dance to celebrate.

Virtual Ethnography

This week I most enjoyed Taylor’s (2009)” article on virtual worlds. I found that this article provided me with a framework that I could use in my research proposal assignment. I was most interested in Taylor’s discussion of verifiability and reliability. I agree with his assertion that there is no significant reason to believe that offline interviews should be privileged above online ones in all cases. Taylor discusses the epistemological claim that the offline self consists of an authentic persona that is more “true” than anything that can be represented by an avatar. However, neither Taylor nor I believe this to be the case. I agree that we are always creating and recreating ourselves and controlling how we present ourselves to the world, whether in the online or the offline world. Although it may be more noticeable when we present ourselves as a cartoon, it is not philosophically different than when we present ourselves as an employee, student, friend, family member, etc. depending on the context of our surroundings. The online world is merely another context and environment in which we live.

Taylor also notes that there are some instances where online interviews can provide a richer data set, and that researchers should be prepared to engage in multi-modal information gathering. This is particularly relevant to my research proposal because I intend to study sufferers with social anxiety. It will be important to be flexible with the format of interviews because it will depend on what modes of communication participants in the study will be most comfortable with. Some might prefer e-mail or instant messaging, while others may be comfortable with telephone, video-conference, or in-person interviews. As Taylor points out, there are different types of information that can be revealed by each type of interview method, and one should not be privileged above the others. Instead, each research case and context should be considered independently.

Intent Versus Function in Research

I just wanted to clear up what I was getting at today in lecture. When I spoke of the issues of intent and function within the context of the macro-analysis of audience interpretation of methodology I was proposing that we shift the way we discuss research. In short, as much as the intent of a particular researcher's work is significant, perhaps, like art, what is mostly significant is the interpretation of that researcher's work. An important paper on this idea comes from studies of visual rhetoric, namely, Sandra Foss and her paper titled "Ambiguity as Persuasion: The Vietnam

Veterans Memorial".

This extends to discussions of claimsmaking. Is claimsmaking a limiting activity? How does interpretation of findings by the researcher limit further discussion of those findings? What if we simply provided the data, and let the broader academic community attribute significance to findings?

The Experiment in Flux

I saw Lucy Suchman and Natalie Jeremijenko weigh the meaning of "experiment" at the Technoscience Salon this past Friday. Philosophers of science grapple endlessly with the subject of "what constitutes experiment" in the context of traditional science, and many of the more orthodox types have a real problem affording the concept to social scientists, as if Latour, Haraway, and Suchman herself, haven't spent years wrestling with it as well.
I am less interested in this battlefront, as I am in exploring novel ways to consider the traditional experiment, especially in the context of developing a reflexive methodological approach.

Hine repeatedly focuses on this concept of reflexivity, emphasizing the idea of "immersion... by engaging in relevant practices wherever they might be found."
Jeremijenko blurs the lines between ethnography and experiment by immersing herself in her study subject. As Hine notes, "there are some interesting opportunities to be exploited by a move into more active engagement." This is the blurring of the lines Jeremijenko engages in: nearly every one of her "field sites" is situated in the body, in society, in the environment, in the spatial...

I am reminded of Feyerabend, who I'm going to paraphrase (very) loosely:  method needs to constantly be reinterpreted. It must grow and be reflexive, or risk being doomed. Stasis is the enemy of science. Feyerabend was postulating on the scientific method, but I don't think I'm out of line in applying his thesis here. The experiment, or the ethnography, or the case study... must grow and be adaptive. Feyerabend argued for an open and reflexive approach to epistemology. Both Suchman and Jeremijenko argue for no less.

Virtual Ethnography

It was interesting to see how many ideas we discussed in several courses all showed up in Hine's article. Salsa-dancing social science research, methodological flexibility, ethnography, technological 'indeterminism,' social constructivism....the list goes on and on.

Especially noteworthy is Hine's description of the Internet as having "many different social meanings" (5). Web 2.0 is alternately dubbed "social media." The collaborative nature of the Internet is built into its name. We define our Internet usage by how various online tools connect people over spatial and temporal boundaries (Instant Messenger, Youtube, Email, Facebook.....). A still-contentious issue is whether the Internet has altered the nature of social interactions, or vice versa. Another things I'm curious about, and which Hine also touches on, is what constitutes a 'field' to perform virtual ethnography. Does it have to be a physical space, like an Internet cafe or a library, or even an average Canadian household? Can Facebook be considered a field? If the ethnographer were to set up a Facebook account and observe his/her 'friends' interactions on Facebook, does his/her personal account satisfy the requirements of a clearly-defined 'field'?

I'll just stop rambling for now. Till next week...

Yes, another case study...

I don't know how I can top Brian's post on Yin's article citing Miles's scathing analysis of case studies. By no stretch of the imagination am I an expert on the topic, and I am speaking as a student forced for almost six years to read case study after case study in readings, assignments, etc. I understand the argument that a case study, unlike a survey, is structured as a story. The researcher observes, takes notes, recognizes patterns and similarities, and ends up compiling a representative narrative. Almost the exact same process a novelist follows, although the end result is not as gripping to read.

But during my undergrad studies in English, many class discussions were centred around answering the age-old question: to what extent if fiction 'fiction'? Does the label 'narrative' imply a fictional account? Why are canonical social scientists prone to dismissing case studies - too general? reductionist? unreliable? Why not quantitative research findings, where the numbers can potentially be fudged?

I liked Yin's metaphor of detective work, particularly the reliance on past 'crimes' for solving new ones. Maybe case studies are contextually-limited, but they are also great for recognizing and predicting future patterns of behaviour.

Personally case studies make research concepts come alive for me. I believe in their usefulness as a pedagogical tool.

Gender and Material Environment

I thought that this week’s reading on gender and the material environment by Van Oost (2005) was especially interesting because over the weekend a friend of mine showed me a “manly” lip balm that he had just ordered from the internet. This lip balm is entitled “Chap Fix +” and is advertised as specifically for men. Here is the link for anyone who wants to view this product: http://www.chapfix.com/.

I thought it was interesting how the product developers had conceptualized masculinity. The use of grips on the sides for “inclement conditions” seemed particularly amusing because it implied that its users would need chapstick when engaged in an extreme category – perhaps mountain-climbing or aerial snowboarding.

Over the years I have indeed observed the reluctance of men and women to use products designated as for the other sex. This is so even if they recognize that the gender of products is socially constructed rather than intrinsic. The owner of Chap + himself commented on it being a marketing ploy, but was still more than happy to join in, even stating that he had no choice but to reward such design dedication.

It is interesting to consider how the gendering of products can evolve over time. For example, something as simple as a pair of pants was once thought of to be a men’s product. Nowadays, women can and do wear pants on a regular basis, and the concept of “pants” is much less closely tied to masculinity. However, it is still loosely tied to it, as evidenced by popular sayings such as “She wears the pants in the relationship.”

There also remains a distinction between “men’s pants” and “women’s pants”, although it may be argued that this is necessary due to anatomical differences between men and women. This suggests that as researchers we should be aware of when the gendering of products is due to inherent differences between men and women (e.g. body structure) and when it is more artificially and socially constructed (e.g. the lip balm example).

The transcendence of story-telling

Reading Yin's "The Case Study Crisis" caused a mental outburst that has been building in my mind since the beginning of the semester. As a former humanities student I can't help feeling that a lot of the discussion that takes place in the social sciences is... well... pedantic. The idea presented in Yin (attributed to Miles) that case studies are on the whole unscientific and thus in need of reform only served to reinforce the feeling that a rigid adherence to scientific ideals may lead to babies being thrown out with their bathwater (or valuable methods being dismissed as unscientific). I understand that the accomplishments of the social and natural sciences are a direct result of this rigid adherence to method and system, I just can't see myself being the one doing the policing (the accusation of being "unscientific" sounds too much like the accusation of being "unamerican", as in "House Unamerican Activities Committee"). That said, my spirits are buoyed by Luker's statement that "we are doing theory generating" as opposed to theory testing (pp125). She uses this phrase in the context of sampling but I take it to represent her conception of social science more generally, something akin to Kuhn's revolutionary science. In both cases there is a realization that there ought to be some people working out the existing problems in all of their minutia and some people that are working on the boundaries of the discipline to create new problems. Einstein once called his method "combinatory play": he would take existing concepts -- or methods or systems -- and combine them or reshape them in new ways. To bring this back to Yin: I think story-telling is an important form of combinatory play, a method that sacrifices a degree of objective validity for the creativity that the story-teller imparts to the story, presenting the subject matter in a new and potentially fruitful perspective. In short, I think there is a place for Yin's case study as there is a place for the case studies of someone like Bruno Latour (his "Where are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Door" is brilliant).

Is validity a methodological issue or a conceptual problem?

I have selected "Making the Most of Your Video Collection: Trends in Patron Access and Resource Sharing" by Bergman (2010) assignment#3. The peer review on this article has directed me back to the issues of validity, reliability and generalization issues in qualitative researches that we have discussed a couple weeks ago. In his article, Bergman has proposed university and college academic libraries to review their existing loan policies and procedures on video collection. Her research has included detailed literature reviews to present research findings from university libraries, focus group (university student as library patrons) data, 2 surveys conducted by herself, and a case study on her personal experience with the Minnesota State University library. From the perspective of research method, I cannot deny that her research is well designed with considerable efforts. However, in regard to my background as a student library assistant in two different UofT libraries for more than one year (UTSC library as circulation desk SLA 2008-2009; East Asian Library as GSLA at present), some of what Bergman believes as the causes on the academic library policies and procedures are almost the opposite of what I have learned from my own work experience. Even though Bergman's MSU case can be regarded as a successful demonstration, it cannot apply to my case because her assumption seems to base on a general and standardized collection and funding situation of all academic libraries. Besides, the media format conversion issues are heavily restricted by copyright causes. However, Bergman has clearly stated at the end of her article that copyright issue is out of concern here. In my eyes, a research theory with ignorance of the fundamental contexts on the research subject is hardly reliable. The problem that I find on Bergman's article is mainly a validity issue particularly on the concept of generalization. The Research methods listed in her article seem to be data manipulation tools. In terms of this, I wonder is "validity" a methodological issue or a conceptual issue? If the researcher's primary research theory is already biased, the research methods as it supplemental reinforcement will be invalid. Will it be too late to check validity when the research has already been in the middle of its process? Which one shall be criticized first, the research assumptions or the research methods?

Reflection on Consalvo & Dutton Article

Last week I discovered an interest in game studies and this week’s reading on Game analysis provided another inspiring read. This week’s article by Consalvo & Dutton (2006) provided more of a methodological perspective and was instructive on how to study games qualitatively. Consalvo & Dutton (2006) discuss four parts of a game that can be studied: object inventory, interface study, interaction map, and gameplay log.

I find that gameplay log is the most interesting dimension because it seems to require a nuanced attention to detail to be able to observe. According to Consalvo & Dutton, the researcher who studies gameplay log is looking for the “unexpected” in gameplay to see how potentially open the game is for players. They write, “The researcher is less interested in seeing what options are offered to the player than in seeing what can happen when the player does something the game maker did not intend – and with what result.”

I think that if I were to study games, this is the aspect I would be most interested in because I have long been interested in how humans explored new environments. Each game’s universe is a new environment, every time a gamer begins a new game, he or she must figure out not only what should to be done to “win” the game, but also what can be done incidentally, or “along the way.” I am especially interested in sort of person who wants to play a game subversively – for example, the person who wants to lock a Sim inside a room with no refrigerator or bathroom and see how long it takes for them to turn into a gravestone, or the person who desperately wants to shoot the dog in Nintendo’s Duck Hunt.

I think that despite programmers’ admirable efforts and successes in replicating or augmenting reality for games, it is the moments that are unexpected that ultimately reflect real life the best. A related question to this is how to build unpredictability into a game, but still make sure that the game will continue on? Indeed, game developers have a lot to think about, and that only means that as researchers, we have a lot to think about too.

Unobtrusive Methods

When I read the section in Knight about unobtrusive methods (pp108-109) I kept thinking back to my recent idea of incorporating observation as part of my research design. Knight states that it can be “hard to be confident about what the measures (of unobtrusive methods) mean.” (p109) He uses as an example students’ washrooms, the messy state of which could be due to any number of factors. Or the observation of gestures and use of public space – so much of this would be a matter of the researcher’s own perspective and interpretation… Therefore in this sense (and particularly in relation to my own research) I completely agree that these techniques would need to be accompanied by other approaches in a mixed-methods design, in order to help solidify one's analysis.

The Myth of Objectivity

Following a brief discussion in class today and reading Thomas' article on the defense of content analysis in the postmodern age I was reminded of a common discussion topic during my undergraduate studies. I completed my undergrad in communication studies and a common trope was that objectivity doesn't exist. Thomas indirectly articulates this belief when he writes that "...to [his] knowledge there are no sociocultural or humanistic research techniques that provide direct access to an individual's meaning-making-and-subsequent-application process for everyday life (685). In other words, Thomas focuses on the issue of self-reporting as a technique for garnering information regarding personal meaning-making. This technique is valuable inasmuch as one recognizes it as an interpretive process.

I'm not positive but I believe this argument stems from Baudriallard's notion of simulation and simulacra. Baudriallard would suggest that reality exists in terms of various orders of simulation of an original artifact. At an extreme the simulation no longer resembles the original symbol. In that sense reality is constituted by simulation, and this is especially true within capitalist society. Mass production intensifies this idea. So where is the link? Recall is essentially an attempt at simulating a prior experience, which is always subject to difference in interpretation due to the fallible nature of memory and rationality. The same is arguably true when the researcher performs operationalization, even at the point of defining a research question. In the operationalization context the researcher is attempting to simulate reality within a mediated form: language.

Excuse my philosophical meandering.